The Socialist History Society obsesses over Jews (again)
Sometimes in this life we find it is impossible not to question what we see, read and hear. I had one such moment when I read the latest edition; May 2011, of the
‘Socialist History Society Newsletter’. Aside from the mealy-mouthed excuses from Dr. Francis King about why he can’t work to a timetable like the rest of the world (ironic for a Marxist really): I find it bemusing that we have yet another two mentions of jews in this newsletter.
I haven’t catalogued the amount of mentions of jews in the Socialist History Society newsletter as yet, but I am beginning to think it might be worth doing as it is truly remarkable that a bunch of quite intelligent men and women; some ostensibly European and some not, would decide to spend so much time in their pages talking about a
‘small religious minority’ who they deny having a
‘chosen’ status.
It is truly bizarre unless one takes into account the historic overrepresentation of jews in the Communist Party of Great Britain and the fact that East London was from the 1880s till the 1960s a proverbial potpourri of jewish radicals from the marxists and anarchists to Zionists. (1) It was also home to some of the more radical anti-Semitic groups in Britain such as the Nordic League. (2) Related to this we find an obituary to a member of the tribe who claimed to be a
‘champion of the underprivileged’; one
‘Wolf Wayne’, in the last pages of this issue of the newsletter. (3)
I doubt
‘Wolf Wayne’ was this particular member of the tribe’s given name when he was spat out bawling into this world, but it is also quite possible that his jewish parents decided to give their little budding Karl Marx a leg up in the gentile world by not giving him a name that sounded like he’d just turned up from deepest, darkest Poland complete with caftan and side-locks.
The little darling is recorded by Morgan to have been a
‘lifelong communist’ who like several communists from the Socialist History Society I have noted on seems to have decided that the women of the tribe just aren’t the right type of meat for him. So our dear Wolfie decided to
‘marry out’; or seems to have done, given his wife’s name (surname not given) was
‘Beryl’, which without seeming too sweeping isn’t a name I have come across much in the British jewish community in this period.
Apparently Wolfie’s
‘strong secular beliefs’ didn’t stop him identifying as a jew and being a founding member of the
‘43 Group’, which was essentially a group of jewish thugs who had formerly been employed by His Majesties government to torture and kill Germans, but now decided to use their publicly funded training to do exactly the same to patriotic Britons who didn’t want their country turning into Sodom and Gomorrah.
I always find it rather strange that a jewish communist is somehow allowed; by other communists, to believe that identifying as both a jew and a communist is somehow orthodox, while if a European communist identifies as a European and a communist then he is somehow heterodox. (4) I am sure some leftist out there will suggest it isn’t contradictory, but then I wonder how much the average leftist; or even their dedicated thinkers who spend hours studying the proverbial tea leaves, (5) knows about Judaism and the fact that jews is defined biologically (not by any other means) by both Judaism and jewish culture. You can’t be jewish in Judaism if you aren’t born a jew, but Marxism asserts you can!
So how can you be both? Well you can’t, but Wolfie among others seems to have thought otherwise, but it would appear that Wolfie was more interested in his fellow members of the tribe than his fellow commies. We can be ascertain this from the fact that his eulogy was given by two fellow circumcised ones: his nephew Mike Wayne (of Brunel University) and one Dr. Stephen Amiel.
So where is the universal proletariat now then Wolfie?
References
(1) Possibly still the best general study of this is William Fishman, 1975,
‘East End Jewish Radicals 1875-1914’, 1st Edition, Duckworth: London
(2) Richard Griffiths, 1998,
‘Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British anti-Semitism 1939-1940’, 1st Edition, Constable: London, pp. 109-111
(3) David Morgan,
‘In Memory of Wolf Wayne’, Socialist History Society Newsletter, May 2011, p. 14
(4) This is directly suggested by David Morgan,
‘Celebrating a Modern Socialist Historian’, Op. Cit., p. 10
(5) Or as the jewish leader of the SHS; Eric Hobsbawm, put it in order to put an end to this leftist astrology:
‘Marx and Engels didn’t tell us how to create the revolution’ (I paraphrase). But Eric you know as well as I do that both Marx and Engels held that the concentration of capital in the hands of the ruling capitalist class and the impoverishment of the petit-bourgeois would naturally lead to the revolution (via the politicization of the working class because they would have Marx and Engels put it in
‘The Communist Manifesto’:
‘nothing to lose but their chains’) per the assumptions of their theory of dialectical materialism.
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